“When I walked inside the room, my mouth just fell open,” Morehead says. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She is such a hidden jewel, such a talent.”
Cornin’s bridal shop scene, for instance, sent Morehead back in time to the day she went wedding-dress shopping with her sister-in-law in Oak Park, Ill.
“It was just like reliving an experience,” she says. “The girls jumping rope in front of a house … it was just like [Cornin] was looking through my eyes when she created these things.”
Cornin was aware of her source of inspiration since she first started making the dollhouses. She says she had an epiphany, sitting on the floor at home, surrounded by her pieces, while she remembered what she had been through in life.
“It hit me. I finally got the people out,” she says.
The people who got out of the TV and populated Cornin’s scenes helped spur her emotional recovery. She spent sleepless nights working on the dolls and the scenes — her way to revisit good moments and regain confidence in her ability to live in the outside world.
For five years, Cornin worked all night long on dolls. When the sun started shining, she would wash up and go to work. By the end of the day, she would go back home to start all over again.
“I slept maybe 16 hours a week,” she says. “But this I had control over. I could create my own reality. It was giving [me] back my innocence, giving [me] back what life takes from us just by living.”
As a child, Cornin says, she loved the few dolls she had and dreamed of being a schoolteacher. She graduated from Wheelock College in 1977 with a degree in education, and later earned a master’s degree in education from Curry College. She returned to the church when she was 26 after losing her 21-year-old best friend, who worked with her at James P. Timilty Middle School in Roxbury, to an allergic reaction to peanuts.
“Life was rough,” she says.
After working 27 years for the Boston Public Schools system — 24 at Timilty — Cornin stopped four years ago.
“My kids were dying, being raped. They were hurting each other,” says Cornin, who says she got so depressed by witnessing violence among children she had a nervous breakdown. “I didn’t even know how to make a difference anymore.”
Once again, the dolls helped her heal. So did her husband, Errol, and their two boys, Theophilus, 8, and Leland, 4.
Gradually, the pain faded. So did the need to stay up all night making dollhouses to restore her faith.
“I did this until I didn’t have to do it anymore,” she says. “So now I do it when I want to, and not because I have to.”
Debra Britt, one of the creators of the Harambee doll collectors convention, invited Cornin to exhibit her work at the event. She says that now Cornin is using her art not only as part of the healing process, but also as its own reward.
“You don’t always have to grieve in order to [make] art,” says Britt. “You can do it because it’s just fun.”
With Britt’s help, Cornin is starting her own business. The two are in negotiations to loan some of Cornin’s pieces to museums for exhibition. Cornin hopes the dollhouses find a place by the end of the year.
“I want them to travel,” says Cornin. “It’s about connecting us again as a family.”
She is also working on another dollhouse and several other new projects, including a children’s book, magnets, postcards, limited-edition posters and puzzles of African American images.
“She is phenomenal,” says Britt. “We’re working to get her out there more.”
Cornin earns a stipend from disability retirement, but she says it’s very hard to keep up with the bills, since her husband doesn’t get paid for his work as a minister at the Boston United Pentecostal Church in Brighton.
But Cornin doesn’t worry anymore. She feels she will succeed, even though she’s not selling the dollhouses.
Her fans feel the same way. Morehead, from Illinois, says she would love to see Cornin’s work again, and dreams of one day being able to buy a coffee table book of the dollhouse exhibits to share with her grandchildren and friends.
“It was the most awesome thing I ever saw,” says Morehead. “And [to] think, that one lady sat down and created all those things.”
